Lego collector hopes to start museum

Michael Todd clearly remembers getting his first Lego bricks as a young boy. He had sent in a coupon cut off the side of a Velveeta cheese package, and a few weeks later, a small, unmarked cardboard box arrived in the mail. His father opened the box, and a handful of plastic bricks fell into his lap.

His father didn’t know what to make of the package’s contents, but Todd scooped up the bricks and ran out of the room.

“I was hooked. It kept me involved for hours,” said Todd, 47, who now lives in Pauma Valley with his wife, Beth, the couple’s 5-year-old daughter, Michelle, and “30ish” indoor and outdoor cats.

That early introduction to the world of interlocking plastic bricks became a lifelong passion.

Today, Todd’s house is a veritable Lego museum, with plastic bins and shelves full of Lego toys lining the walls, and glass-fronted display cases holding antique wooden toys made by the Danish company in the 1930s and ’40s, before it began turning out its signature plastic bricks. (The name Lego is an abbreviation of two Danish words, leg godt, which means, “play well.”)

The company now markets its products worldwide, and has Lego-themed amusement parks in several countries, including Legoland in Carlsbad.

“I live, eat and breathe Lego,” said Todd, who often finds the odd Lego piece in his pants pocket or scattered in his car. He estimated his collection — which spills into bins covered by plastic tarps in his front yard — at millions of pieces, along with dozens of wooden cars, trucks, boats, trains, animal-shaped pull toys, and other early products of the Lego company.

Along one wall of his living room are rows of scale-model trains built of Lego bricks, and boxed sets of vintage Lego toys perch on the fireplace mantel. More trains line the overhead roof beams.

While Beth admitted she is not as Lego-crazy as her husband, she said, “I do have some of my own favorite things,” such as the tiny Lego home furnishings, kitchen gear, TV sets and jewelry displayed on another wall of the living room.

Michelle has her own Lego table and bin of bricks in the corner of the room.

Todd works as a heating and air-conditioning repairman at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. His spare time is devoted to Lego. He has helped set up a Lego train display at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park, and he and his wife have also installed a Lego village in the front window of the Swirlz candy shop on Grand Avenue in Escondido.

Todd wants to start a real museum to display his collection and the creations of other Lego enthusiasts. He has formed a board of directors, and also created a nonprofit to run the “L Gauge Museum.” Now all he needs is a place to house it.

“There is no public museum in the world where people can go learn the history of the toy and where it started,” Todd said.